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Pastimes : WORLD WAR III -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (386)	3/16/1999 3:29:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 765

Messrs. Eddy & Ron, I somehow agree with you saying this whole EU Commission imbroglio was a plot... I'm not sure whether it's been set up by the Bilderberg group though. Remember that current President of the EU Commission Jacques Santer was chosen to please the Brits... Initially, there seemed to be a consensus among several European countries to elect Belgium's Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene as the EU President. But such a ''type A'' personality would have given the top European job a much stronger political clout... Jacques Santer was the former Prime Minister of a ''city-state'', that is the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (the smallest European country). He didn't have the experience of crisis management because tiny Luxembourg is such a quiet, consensual, easy-to-run country. Hence, the guy's been trapped in a brutal, machiavelian, bureaucratic environment. Belgium is a much, much more sophisticated society with hundreds of conflicting interests to balance: Flemish vs. Walloon, Brussels vs. both Flemish and Walloons, Socialists vs. Liberals, and inside each linguistic community, there are yet other sub-regional interests that must be taken into account. That's why I think that Belgium's J.-L. Dehaene would not have been so easily destabilized by the current EU scandal. Furthermore, Europe would have had a louder voice on the international arena (Bosnia, Kosovo,...). But such a politically assertive Europe was not to please the U.K. and the pro-U.S. establishment of Germany. So, we ended up with J. Santer and a low-profile, technocratic EU leadership... But now, the time has come for a counterattack! The French are particularly resentful of such a weak EU leadership: the French elite routinely refers to former EU President Jacques Delors who successfully managed to foster the European ideology. That's why they likely crafted the present EU crisis: in less than 3 months, Europeans will go to the polls and vote for a new European Parliament. Therefore, it's crucial for the pro-Europe elites to make sure that this newly elected Parliament supports a high-profile, non-technocratic, executive-minded EU President. The best way to achieve that goal was to ridicule the current EU commission. Now, let me give you a hint: the next EU President will be current NATO General Secretary Javier Solana. His path to Europe's top job is clear: he comes from Spain, that is from Southern Europe. So, he's close to the French, the Italian, the Greek, and even the Belgian. Next, he's got an ideal background: NATO is a political institution, dealing with the very defense of Europe as well as with its expansion towards Eastern/Central Europe. Hence Solana will enjoy the political clout necessary to give back the EU Commission the prestige and the credibility it lost with the former administration. A final note with regard to the ''larger picture''.... Nepotism? corruption? Hey! what's the purpose of such a bureaucratic octopus after all?! The European bureaucracy, ie the so-called eurocracy, was partly created to employ a large number of European bourgeois who couldn't otherwise find any opportunity in the private sector! I guess it's also true for the US bureaucracy in Washington... With all these restructuring, reengineering, globalization schemes going on throughout the corporate landscape, a bureaucratic safe-haven such as a eurocracy was the only ''exit strategy'' for Europe's white-collar workforce. Regards, Gustave.